DISCOVERING ARCHETYPES – DAY 2: THE SHADOW ARCHETYPE

The shadow contains our weaknesses, undesired traits, repressed ideas and desires which we find difficult to accept as part of us. It is usually known to be dark and mysterious – therefore the name, Shadow. It is often unexpressed and rejected but surely it is always there, just as other archetypes are.

“Everyone carries a shadow and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.” – Carl Jung

Projection is mechanism of psychological defense whereby we see in others those characteristics, feelings or impulses that we would not accept in ourselves. This way, we can recognize that quality and also have a rejecting relationship with it in the conscious mind, by seeing it in someone else. We turn a personal inferiority into someone else’s deficiency.

While the projection allows for the shadow to be seen in the conscious, it creates even a bigger illusion that characteristics we openly detest cannot be our own.

Several ways in which projection manifests in our daily lives are: assuming that others are critical of your performance, when it is you who is feeling insecure about it, a person who has a short temper believing that others have anger issues, damning someone for cheating and thinking that we are incapable of doing the same, someone who feels a compulsion to steal, fearing that something valuable belonging to them might get stolen etc. Often, feelings and thoughts around sex and aggression are the most repressed aspects of the psyche and therefore most easily projected.

Since the shadow exists as an unacknowledged part of self, one of the safest ways to confront its existence is through story and myth. The villains and vamps are made of ideas that the shadow holds. Often, stories show a clear divide between good and evil characters, but some writers have time and again allowed the hero to be grey.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are the same person. The same, people-friendly Dr. Jekyll has a dark sinister side to him, that comes up in the night (makes sense for the dark side to express at a dark time like the night). Night is also a time when the society’s guard is relaxed, when people are watching other people less which makes it easier for the repressed aspects of the self, in this case Mr. Hyde to come out into the open with a vengeance against the society that is even causing this aspect of him to be repressed in the first place.

In Dr. Jekyll’s situation, the shadow is so repressed that another personality altogether different needs to emerge. However with other stories, for instance with Neo in Matrix or with Bruce Wayne (Batman) in Dark Knight, it is seen that they have a shadow/weakness that is closer to awareness. In their cases they needed a mentor (another archetype that we will discuss later in the context of the hero archetype) to guide them, to help them integrate their shadow.

In the movie ‘The Dark Knight’, there’s a beautiful scene where there is an exchange between Batman and the Joker. While the Joker is a trickster archetype, he does expose the shadow of the society as a means to weakening Batman’s resolve to save that society.  In his own trickster way, he provokes Batman by saying all the things that Batman may have denied to himself.